Listen
You who chew on my solitude
with your televisions on
You who attend my funeral every morning
to light a candle
Listen
I will drive a verb into your eyes
I will plant a beat in your chests

I don’t have a cent in my heart
or smooth talk and epithets hidden in my pocket
I scatter my beauty on concrete streets
I dip my hands in poets’ blood
I write everything in 9 mm caliber
There’s no one for me to respect
A twenty-one-year-old Muslim punk
I bear no responsibility
I spit words at 120 B.P.M.

You man in the street!
You portion out love in inches
Purchase love with credit cards
Trumpet your prowess
At your screen you download erections
None of you can touch my body
I paint my lips black every night

Listen to me, you who leaf through my defeats!
You want me to be a straight line, a man and not a boy
You want me to be a well-sewn jacket
Polite and politic
You tie my arms to watch hands
You try to jam me into this world
Can you, like me,
turn words into deeds?
Can you carry springtime in your bellies?
Burn without ashes?

Come let me make you human,
you, Your Honor, who wipe guilt from your beard
you, esteemed journalist, who tout death
you, philanthropic lady, who pat children’s heads without bending down
and you who read this poem, licking your finger—
To all of you I offer my body for genuflection
Believe me
one day you will adore me like Christ

But I’m sorry for you sir—
I do not negotiate with chartered accountants of words
with art critics who eat from my hand
You may, if you desire, wash my feet
Don’t take it personally

Why do I need bullets if there are so many words
prepared to die for me?

Jazra Khaleed was born in 1979 in Grozny, Chechnya. He lives in Athens’ inner city and writes poetry in Greek, publishing mainly in samizdat and online. He is an editor of the new Athenian literary magazine Teflon, in which he also publishes poetry, translations, and articles. With the Greek poet Kyoko Kishida he is currently cotranslating poetry by Keston Sutherland, and is preparing Teflon issues on hip hop poetry and Australian aboriginal writing. His poetry has appeared in English in World Literature Today and Modern Poetry in Translation

Peter Constantine’s most recent translations are Self’s Murder, by Bernhard Schlink (Vintage Books, 2009), Sophocles’s Three Theban Plays (Barnes & Noble Classics, 2008) and The Essential Writings of Machiavelli (Modern Library, 2007). He was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories, by Thomas Mann, and the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov. His translation of the complete works of Isaac Babel received the Koret Jewish Literature Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation. He has recently translated Within Four Walls: The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, 1936-1968 for Harcourt, and Gogol's Taras Bulba, Tolstoy's The Cossacks, and Voltaire's Candide for Modern Library. He was one of the editors for A Century of Greek Poetry: 1900-2000 and The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (W.W. Norton, 2010). He is currently working on a translation of The Essential Writings of Rousseau for The Modern Library. He is the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship for his translation of Emmanuel Roidis.

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Words without Borders opens doors to international exchange through translation, publication, and promotion of the best international literature. Every month we publish select prose and poetry on our site. In addition we develop print anthologies, work with educators to bring literature in translation into classrooms, host events with foreign authors, and maintain an extensive archive of global writing.